The Exile's Song by Sally McKee

Author:Sally McKee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300221367
Publisher: Yale University Press

The year 1870 was a watershed for Dédé, for reasons having to do with his compositions and the changes in popular demand for certain kinds of music. During the 1860s and 1870s, he composed most of the pieces that made contemporary musicologists take note of him. He drew praise for La Sensitive, a two-act ballet, which debuted at the Grand Théâtre in late April 1877, while he was conducting at the Alcazar Theater.44 Judging by the names he gave to the characters in the ballet, the now-lost plot resembled that of Giuseppe Verdi’s grand opera set in ancient Egypt, Aïda (1871). The principal ballerinas’ roles were called “Naïda,” “Néméa,” “Demona,” “Ophélia,” and “Krydja,” all but the last derivative of Verdi or Shakespeare. The corps was rounded out by two high priests and an Indian. Reviewing the ballet, Anatole Loquin, a critic and editor of a short-lived monthly music journal La musique à Bordeaux, wrote, “There are some pretty motifs in the occasionally rather loud [brayante] music of the head conductor of the orchestra at the Alcazar Theater.”45 Loquin’s condescension suggests that it was by then unusual for a professional musician to produce pieces for both the cafés-concerts and an art music hall like the Grand Théâtre.

Most of the titles of Dédé’s works that survive from this period were typical of songs and music heard in venues like the Alcazar and the Folies-Bordelaises rather than the Grand Théâtre. Lester Sullivan, the scholar who has produced the most accurate summary of Dédé’s biographical details, counted over 250 dances, songs, ballet music, and orchestral works written during his exile in France. Between 1865 and 1881, Dédé and the lyricists with whom he worked published their songs in Bordeaux.46 From 1880 on, however, Dédé had most of his songs published in the urban market that mattered most to him, Paris. He was aiming at two different geographic markets simultaneously as the printed inscriptions on the sheet music make clear. To take one example, the cover of the sheet music for “My Handsome Tyrolian” (1876) bears the inscription, “Dedicated to Madame Maria Rivière of the Eldorado; sung by Mlle Marquet at the Alcazar.” The Eldorado was one of the largest and most popular cafés-concerts in Paris, but Mademoiselle Marquet toured the country and performed at Bourdeaux cafés-concerts like the Alcazar. Other examples of his surviving sheet music contain dedications to theater managers and performers based in Paris and also to colleagues in the business both in Bordeaux and in Paris. Dédé, then, was intending to bring his songs to the Parisian market as early as 1880.

Despite his productivity and the occasional reviews of his work in the bordelais press, his celebrity in Bordeaux’s art music circles faded as the years passed. The critic Anatole Loquin pointed to the inclusion of Dédé and two other Bordeaux composers in the 1878 edition of Fétis’s Biographie universelle des musiciens (referred to informally as “Fétis,” it is the nineteenth-century French equivalent to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians) as

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